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for the cattle's return. There were two houses, one for Jerseys (as Mrs Bosenna explained), the other for Devons; and she drew his attention to their drainage system. "If I had my way, every cow in the land should be as cleanly lodged as a cottager. None of your infected milk for me!" From the cow-houses she conducted him through the mowhay, where the number and amplitude of the ricks fairly took his breath away. "Oh, we call Rilla quite a small farm!" said Mrs Bosenna carelessly. "But I could never endure to be short of straw. Clean bedding is a craze with me." She halted and invited him to admire some details in the thatching--the work of an old man past seventy, she told him, and sighed. "Thatching's a lost art, almost. Too much education nowadays, and everybody in a hurry--that's what's the matter. . . . In a few years we shall all be thatching with corrugated iron." "An' by that time every one will be in steam." "Eh?" "Shipping, ma'am." "Ah, yes--to be sure. And everybody making butter with a County Council separator. 'All very scientific,' I tell them, 'so long as you don't ask me to eat it!' Why, look at this!" Captain Cai looked. She was holding out her hand palm uppermost, and a very pretty, plump hand it was to be sure. "I should be sorry to say how many hundredweights of butter I've made wi' that very hand--or how many hundreds of persons have eaten it." Captain Cai dived his own hands into the hip-pockets of his new coat, aimlessly searching for pipe and tobacco-pouch; not that he would have ventured to smoke in her presence!--but it gave his hands something to do. "'Glad,' I think you must mean, ma'am," said he slowly. She laughed. "If you're going to make pretty speeches, it's time for me to run indoors," and she left him with a warning that dinner would be ready in ten minutes, or at one o'clock to the tick. This was by the gate of a broad-acred field ("Parc Veor" she had called it) in which her Jerseys browsed. Captain Cai counted them--they were five--while still half-consciously searching for pipe and pouch, which, in fact, he had left behind in the shop, in the pockets of his old coat. By-and-by he realised this, and with a curious sense of helplessness--of having lost his bearings. . . . Ten minutes later Dinah, coming across the mowhay to invite Captain Cai into the house, found him leaning against the gate, sunk in a brown study, contemplating the kine. Th
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